Pringles, a scottish maker of sweaters tries a different route: animated story telling. I like the simplicity and honesty of this approach. Sometimes a story is more effective than a reason to believe.
Via Daniel Bevis
Nice little video about social media. I think it’s good for Clients because it doesn’t take sides in terms of individual versus commercial expression. It’s all good!
Here is a video blog by Leo Burnett for Procter & Gamble, of a guy waking up one morning to find he lost his guy parts. Pretty racey for P&G. Kudos!
See the whole blog here:
Ok, warning first: what you are about to see is, well, let’s say: it ain’t smooth jazz, so be prepared for expletives.
Jon LaJoie’s is seemlingly stating the obvious: most of the rapper scene’s make-believe is going on our nerves:by copying style, clothes, language and gesticulation of the rapper set, and juxtaposing the actual live story of a normal customer service representative who makes paper planes, hurt his back and makes pretty good spaghetti sauce, debunks the aspirational hype that works so well for performing artists in this genre.
But there’s more for me in it: this made me think of our tendency as ad and marketing people to construct “target audiences” which, in reality don’t exist, and how we should, you know, stop that. Fact is, yeah, we would like to be able to choose which people buy our products, but it just doesn’t reflect real people and real behavior. As a result, it is a big mistake to construct personas based on mapping them to brand attributes. While brands can adopt an aspirational quality and tonality, the observation of people and their true behavior is paramount, not target strategies that inject brand attributes into the social milieu of our choosing, and hence turn upside down the very thing we are supposed to accomplish. It’s not about brands manipulating people to achieve marketing objectives. It’s about people influencing brands, so brand can enter a real value exchange with them.
I take this video as a reminder, to, like, get real.
Thank to Simone and Peter for the inspiration!
Finally a real song for all us digital natives and immigrants.. It even has a refrain. Enjoy!
via Toad Stool
We often build sites, microsite and specials for our clients. And often, they want video on it.
One of the most important things we always say is: if you want a great brand experience, you can’t use stock imagery or footage. You need to come up with a content strategy, and take the time to develop a story, script, story, cast it, shoot it: the works for a whole TV production, in fact. Also, dare to leave the boundaries of the CD/CI and delve into graphic and animation design in favor of the story you’re trying to tell, as opposed to always telling a brand story. This is because as soon as users smell boxed in, rehashed, repurposed video/animation content, they leave; they smell the marketing because they don’t receive anything in return for the attention. If you as a brand don’t try harder, why should I consume your (badly designed) messaging?
Not sure how long this has been up already, but we found a great example of a brand known for taking their time to develop the right style and really lets their agency push the creative envelope. As part of the “Here I am” Nike Women campaign, the site features amazingly animated video, including amazing effects, each story with its own style. Apart from it being insight-driven, it also uses a visual language women ought to find appealing.
If you can’t go to this level of committment in creating work, it is often
better to try something else instead. Because in these cases, badly
shot, designed, and produced video and animation work has a way of
quickly working against you.
